Neil McRoberts Assistant Professor of Plant Pathology

May 31, 2013

Sustainability:

ANR Sustainable Food Systems Panel Webinar

Linking Theory to Practice

Scene-setting

• Pick up on some themes raised by Tom Tomich in the first seminar in the series:• http://lecture.ucanr.org/Mediasite/Play/

1a20972eadba48cc95e01a7bd23b83571d

• Sustainability science• Anticipating thresholds and challenges• How to translate theoretical concepts into

practical, local actions• People

• Offer some observations on making interdisciplinary interaction work

• Give a few pointers to web resources on sustainability/resilience

1. Holistic, inter-disciplinary understanding of the interactions between social, economic, management and environmental drivers which impact upon farming systems (including climate change, protection of biodiversity and sustainability)

2. To develop acceptable ranges of key criteria for farm resilience and to test concepts of farm resilience under contrasting levels of farm management.

3. Optimised models of farm-scale management for landscape-scale environmental benefits.

4. An evidence base for advice to farmers on solutions that are good for the environment and good for business.

Example Required Outputs from Scottish Sustainable FarmingSystems, science tendering document (2008)

Why does so much of the policy discussion remind us of this cautionary tale?

4

Sustainability: is it all chatter?

© Thorarinn Leifsson

Pieter Breuegel, now attributed to unknown copyist, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brussels

Perhaps because“…the ploughman mayHave heard the splash, the forsaken cry,But for him it was not an important failure;”

W.H. Auden

Simple concepts, difficult science

5

It is not easy to compare these domains directly

Scientists: sometimes we don’t help our rationale be understood

6

Policy Science

Guard against the“progressive policy wonk

effect”

http://www.fao.org/docrep/008/y5983e/y5983e10.htm

Niels Roling “the progressive farmer effect”

First take-home

• Give clear, technical definitions of important terms and stick to them to anchor the wider discussion in science

• Particularly, Sustainability and Resilience

Retaining the core meaning of sustainability

Sustainability at time, T

Instantaneous probability of failure

Threshold for failure

1. Holistic, inter-disciplinary understanding of the interactions between social, economic, management and environmental drivers which impact upon farming systems (including climate change, protection of biodiversity and sustainability)

2. To develop acceptable ranges of key criteria for farm resilience and to test concepts of farm resilience under contrasting levels of farm management.

3. Optimised models of farm-scale management for landscape-scale environmental benefits.

4. An evidence base for advice to farmers on solutions that are good for the environment and good for business.

Example Required Outputs from Scottish Sustainable FarmingSystems, science tendering document (2008)

First take-home

• Give clear, technical definitions of important terms and stick to them to anchor the wider discussion in science

• Particularly, Sustainability and Resilience

Retaining the core meaning of sustainability

Sustainability at time, T

Instantaneous probability of failure

Threshold for failure

What does this suggest about the time-course for sustainability?

The simplest case:If Fx,t(x0) is a constant

Let p = p(t) = Fx,t(x0)Assume p(t) = p(t-1) t

If p is probability of failing, (1-p) is probability of not failing.Probability of not failing for 2 consecutive periods is (1-p)×(1-p) = (1-p)2

Probability of not failing for t periods is (1-p)t

S(T) = (1-p)t

The simplest case, in pictures

S(T) = (1-p)t

p = 0.1

Drabenstott, M. 1999. Consolidation in U.S. Agriculture: The New Rural Landscape and Public Policy. First Quarter Economic ReviewFederal Reserve Bank, Kansas City

USDA, 2002

Real-world examples

Anticipating thresholds

• See slide #17 in Tom Tomich’s presentation

Sustainability is multidimensional: what should we expect to see?

time

S(T)

time to failure

Prob

abil

ity

dens

ity

Two views of Resilience: “adaptionist” or “engineering”

Evolutionary, adaptive,open hierarchical systems,multiple stable states, self-organizing

Equilibrium,dynamics, stabilityperiodicity, regulation oscillations,

Adaptionist viewpointemphasis on cyclicity?

Engineering viewpointemphasis on seriality?

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

0 10 20 30 40 50

year (t)

Bli

ght i

nten

sity

inde

x

Are these views really different?

Resilience caricatures in pictures

Both views of resilience depend on the “dynamical landscape” of the system

From Scheffer et al. 2012

Indi

cato

r v

aria

ble

valu

e

System state or rate

HIGH RESILIENCEAdaptionist: High capacity to absorb shockEngineering: Short return time to initial state

LOW RESILIENCEAdaptionist: Low capacity to absorb shockEngineering: Long return time to initial state

Take home 2

• Sustainability and resilience are properties of systems (physical, living, economic, social and hybrids of these)

• Sustainability is the capacity for a system to persist over time and is best measured in relation to a stated time interval.

• Resilience is a component of sustainability related to the dynamic stability of a system and can be measured in a number of different but connected ways some of which focus on temporal dynamics some of which focus on capacity to absorb perturbation

What can we do with our definitions to help make them operational?

Tom’s raised the issue of how to make broad,aspirational definitions operational.

That was the issue here too

This step depends on having clear and formaldefinitions for sustainability and resilience.

Getting operational: using our formal models as guides for action

The simplest case:If Fx,t(x0) is a constant

S(T) = (1-p)t

Model suggest two access routesfor action:Reduce probability of failureChange/remove/buffer thresholds

22

How much difference can management make?

0 10 20 30 40 500

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1

p= 0.1p = 0.01

Time

Sus

tain

abil

ity

Decrease instantaneous probability of failure by factor of 10

S(T) = 0.545

S(T) = 0.042

Time period for S(T)

Individuals oraverages?

Cross-scaleperspectives

Levers and indicators

23

Sustainability management questions are often BLOPs:

Bi-level Optimisation Problems

Policy lever

Indicator

Within the follower level, we are dealing with individuals not aggregate (statistical) behavior

Nt = B[N0, (1-p)t]

ANR

25

Modernity and the risk society

• Current theoretical background developed by Anthony Giddens (LSE) and Ulrich Beck (Munich/LSE):• Function of modernity: greatest risks now come from

actions of society not the external world

• Sociology-speak: Risk perception has both contextual and individualistic components, or;

• Science-speak: Risk perception is a PE interaction

• An historical emphasis on farmer typologies (i.e. risk-behaviour phenotypes). • Rodger’s work on diffusion of innovations• David Pannell (WA) perspectives from Ag. Econ.• Edinburgh farmer scales Ian Deary, Joyce Willock (+others)

Followers are diverse

26

Group B might be bestinstigators of change

#8 sees connectedness buthas relatively low outdegreescore for AEM

slide27

28

0

5

10

15

20

25

0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6

Decision false positive rate

Sus

tain

abil

ity

(mea

n su

rviv

al ti

me)

Linking individual decisionsto policy outcomes

-4

0

4

8

12

16

20

24

0 5 10 15 20

Financial growth stabilisesas decision qualityincreases

-12

-8

-4

0

4

8

12

16

0 5 10 15 20

Cumulative value

Cumulative value

slide

Social networks and (some aspects of) why they matterhttp://environmentalpolicy.ucdavis.edu/project/sustainable-viticulture-practice-adoption-and-social-networks

29

From the Sustainable Viticulture project in the Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior, UCD. Matt Hoffman, Vicken Hillis, Mark Lubell.

Cross-domain linkages are the most problematic pieces

30

Some of the most telling criticisms of World3 concern linkages between different domains

World3 attracted a lot of adverse comment from fellow scientists

In spite of the criticisms, World3 did a reasonable job of predicting some aspects of the earth system behaviour between 1980 and 2010

Tom’s slides 8-12

SiMoSu: Simple Model for Sustainability

31

Environmental

Economic

Social

Economy Social Capital

Population

Environment

Resource use relative toequitable, global C footprint

Novel function derivedfrom population size& concept of socialscarcity

Voinov sustainability model

1Population

2Development

4Investment

capital

3Environmental.

degradation

Participative modeling: bringing more people into the fold of science out of the wilderness of pseudo-science

Wider cultural effects and personal narratives are important if less easy to capture

Take-home 3

• Be aware of the importance of hierarchies and their effects

• Making sustainability or resilience operational means working with people, sometimes across scales

• Can use formal methods to capture and use personal and collective knowledge/opinion

Resilience?

Deterministic Stochastic

Endogenous

Exogenous

Statistical property

Sou

rce

of f

acto

r

Essentials of stochastic series processes

Nt = f(Nt-i, Zt-j)

deterministic componentcapturing self regulation

Stochastic componentcapturing environmentalinfluence

f(Nt-i)

g(t) h(Zt)

Implications from time-series

“… I interpret the notion of (population) persistence…as a close resemblance of the behaviour of the population, until its accidental extinction, to the behaviour of a model process that conforms to the constraint on its second-order moment.” (Royama, 1996)

Amxt 2)log(

0lim

Rt

Fluctuations are, with high probability, finite in amplitude

There is no net long term change in system indicator

0Trajectories are non-chaotic and converge on an attractor

(Turchin 2003)

39

Characterising resilience in dynamic systems

R2pred

LE

-1 10

-

+

(I) (II)

(III) (IV)

Chaotic, low ARpredictive

power

Chaotic, some AR predictive

power

Convergent, low ARpredictivepower

Convergent, some ARpredictive power

Predictability from historical trajectory

Tend

ency

to c

haot

ic d

iver

genc

e

If system dynamics fall in thisregion then the system is likelyto display resilience.

Note: if we are consideringa “bad” system property (e.g.disease prevalence) this mightimply resistance rather thanresilience

slide

What do production systems deliver?

40

Soi

l OM

%

Year

LE

R2pred

Soil properties fluctuating around stable equilibria, with dynamics dominated by environmental noise and first order lag dependence

Reserves out of main cycles are important

n

£n-1

en-1

n+1

Farm

42

Linking individual decisions to policy outcome

When there is no connection between policy formulationand on-farm practice the two parts of the system haveseparate dynamicsExample from arable weed management

BUT! If policy objectives are connected too much to farmer objectives, by over-monitoring of agri-environment measures, the policy cycle starts to be driven by short-term system dynamics

Take-home 4

• Quantitative analysis of resilience requires long term data

• Making theories operational requires working with people (c.f. sustainability)

• Hierarchies and cross-scale effects are important

Design principles for sustainability science

I.O.U.O.R.M.I.• Identify Object(s) to be sustained• Use Occam’s Razor and• Methodological Individualism

• Be clear about what is at risk• Keep it as simple as possible• Beware of over doing reductionism

How should we organize ourselves to deliver sustainability science?

• Work from stable, scientific core definitions of key concepts

• Reaffirmation/rejuvenation/redefinition of the Land Grant mission• 2D Interdisciplinarity

• Institutional support/recognition for “connectors”• Promote hybrid disciplines and non-standard

views of scientific methodology

Academic interactions

KT interactions

Some useful web resources• The Resilience Alliance:

• www.resalliance.org• Dashboard of Sustainability

• http://www.iisd.org/cgsdi/dashboard.asp

• World Bank global atlas of statistics• http://www.app.collinsindicate.com/worldbankatlas-global/en-us

• Statistical Visualization tools (and other fun things)• http://www.gapminder.org/

• FAO statistics• http://www.fao.org/corp/statistics/en/

Neil McRoberts Assistant Professor of Plant Pathology

May 31, 2013

Sustainability:

Questions?

Linking Theory to Practice